From ashes will rise a new home, rebuilt from an old house

WASHINGTON — Terri Rosenthal decided to save an old house after she lost hers. Her family’s three-story Victorian was gone in moments, burned to ashes last year in a fire so hot it shattered a cast-iron claw-foot tub and melted the siding of homes across the street.

She and her husband, Craig, had bought the home in Pennsylvania 25 years ago when her sister’s family needed a place to live. Various family members had lived in it over the years, but no one was home at the time of the fire.

Last month, a neighbor pleaded guilty to arson and other charges.

Rosenthal’s family heirlooms, such as her grandmother’s books from Russia, a hand-carved antique bed and a silk Persian rug, were destroyed. “There was nothing left,” she said. “It was a cinder.”

Instead of building something new to replace the house, she wanted to save something old.

The fire came after she had lived in Loudoun County, Va., for 30 years, watching it go from sleepy countryside to booming exurb, losing some of its weathered old barns and homes to new subdivisions and mansions.

She wanted to send a message: that history is worth saving, and it doesn’t take new construction to get a fresh start.

So she’s in the midst of a multiyear project, dismantling an 18th-century house in Massachusetts piece by careful piece, packing the house into a tractor-trailer, and moving it to the Rosenthals’ contemporary home in Purcellville, Va. There, they will rebuild the old building like a giant jigsaw puzzle of hand-hewn timber and antique bricks.

Along the way, the Rosenthals have found all sorts of serendipitous surprises tucked into dark corners, from an elegant antique silver fork to rare and beautiful blue bottles to scraps of linen and shears that reminded Terri of her own clothing-design company.

They were surprised to find that the house had been taken apart and moved once before and amazed that one of the families that had lived there shared ancestors with the Rosenthals.

“There are all these weird little coincidences, tiebacks,” Terri Rosenthal said. “It’s almost like it was meant to happen. Kismet.”

Preservationists debate how best to save historic homes. Since many get torn down because they are stuck in the middle of increasingly valuable commercial land, the idea of moving them is seen either as a brilliant solution or a mistake that wrenches them out of their original landscapes.

It’s not easy, and it’s not cheap — it can cost $100,000 or more to dismantle and ship a museum-quality building.

The Rosenthals are hoping to convince others that it’s not as daunting as it sounds; they think they can take apart and rebuild the Everett-Stanley House, named for previous owners, for less than the cost of a new home. They paid $1 for the house and an estimated $40,000 to get it to Virginia. They don’t yet know what it will cost to rebuild.

Some preservationists in Virginia winced at the idea of an 18th-century New England structure being attached to a contemporary house in Virginia to create a large home for four generations, as the Rosenthals plan to do.

But the Everett-Stanley House was doomed: It sat smack in the way of a planned parking lot at a car dealership and has been holding up development for months. According to Ann Chapdelaine, chairman of the North Attleborough Historical Commission in Massachusetts, the company that owns the land started to tear down the house without a permit. The historical commission slapped an 18-month stay on that action in hopes that the dealership would find a way to save the house.

For months, there was a sign outside: FREE HOUSE. It wasn’t until the Rosenthals came along that anyone was willing to go to the expense to take it away.